Category Archives: News

How “small” can the gap be? -A huge landmark in number theory.

What’s the gap between consecutive primes? One can easily observe that the gap will keep increasing as the primes become far rarer. However, for the bounded gap, there exists infinitely many pairs of primes. This is a form of the … Continue reading

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48th Known Mersenne Prime Discovered

Details from the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search: On January 25th, prolific GIMPS contributor Dr. Curtis Cooper discovered the 48th known Mersenne prime, 257,885,161-1, a 17,425,170 digit number. This find shatters the previous record prime number of 12,978,189 digits, also … Continue reading

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ABC Conjecture

An exciting story has developed over the past few months. In August 2012, after months of rumors, the mathematician Shinichi Mochizuki rounded out a series of papers which he claims prove the ABC Conjecture: For every ε > 0, there … Continue reading

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Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons and the First-Sale Doctrine

As I write this post, a well-worn copy of Rudin’s Real and Complex Analysis lies on my desk. The red cover identifies the book as a McGraw-Hill international edition, a gift from my mom who was most likely unaware of … Continue reading

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This Day in Mathematics History

I enjoy reading about mathematics history. One of my favorite websites for this is http://www-history.mcs.st-and.ac.uk/Day_files/Now.html hosted by the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. Today’s mathematician births and deaths are shown below. This page also has some quotations from the day’s featured … Continue reading

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